flufandomcom-20200213-history
Talk:Educational materials
Introduction by Kathleen, chief author (so far) After three days of scavenging, I have located influenza resources in 73 different languages. Today's triumph was the discovery of a hygiene poster in Acholi published by the Maine CDC, and shortly thereafter a brochure and poster in Yiddish from the NYC Health Department. Most of the materials on the list were prepared by public health departments in English-speaking countries, the U.S. military and international aid agencies (e.g., UNICEF). Due to my linguistic limitations, certain languages remain under-represented or completely unrepresented -- most of them European languages with no significant immigration currently occurring to English-speaking countries. The wish list includes Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian, and Swedish. Eventually I would like to include in each listing the name of the document in the language in which it was prepared. I have done this in a few instances where the title was readily available on the .html page, but have not opened every single .pdf or Google cache to see if I could cut-and-paste. The page has become very large and slow to load (at least with my pokey connection). It seems to me that it would be appropriate to split it off, either by geographic region (i.e., Asian languages, African languages, etc.), or by creating individual pages for languages with a lot of material (i.e., English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese). I'm fairly new to wiki editing and don't know how to connect the pages to each other yet. Once the page has been subdivided, I can further categorize links into (1) swine and pandemic flu, (2) seasonal flu, (3) avian flu, and (4) hygiene education. This might not be necessary on shorter lists, but it would help to make the longer ones more readable and the information more accessible. I haven't bothered to do this yet because it would only make the page longer. It would be nice to spread the contents list across two columns, so it would only take up a single screen. Is this possible? I intend to regularly monitor the major public health sites for the appearance of new educational materials specific to H1N1. May I propose a toast to the staff members of these agencies, who have obviously been working overtime this week. --KathleenSeidel 23:03, 1 May 2009 (UTC) (aka various anonymous IP addresses) Subdividing I recommend subpages, individually categorized in as many ways as can be useful, e.g.(1)(2) etc above and regions/language families. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:33, 2 May 2009 (UTC) Started with a Chinese. The separator for native name etc should not be a slash in case we want to subdivide further - so I'll make them hyphens. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:54, 2 May 2009 (UTC) Expanding the links to subpages is a waste of space and has not changed the function or the appearance of the links. I'll be reverting some as I do other things to them. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:30, 2 May 2009 (UTC) ::Thanks for your note on User talk:69.19.14.17, and sorry if I messed anything up that you were working on. I'm not sure what you mean by "expanding the links to subpages" etc. Please forgive me, I'm new to wiki editing so am therefore unfamiliar with many wiki technical terms and concepts (hence, for instance, my original, uninformed use of slashes to separate English language names from native names). I added the native names this morning when I had access to the laptop that display them properly, and also edited the Flemish and Gujarati H2's to conform to the pattern you established for language-name H2's. (They appeared to have been inadvertently overlooked in the first pass.) I will not make any further edits until you have completed your refinements to the page structure and organization, but rather will spend some more time gathering new material to fill in content gaps. KathleenSeidel aka -- 14:25, 3 May 2009 (UTC) I've divided the "Influenza Brochures & Fact Sheets" sections on the main page and all subpages into three subcategories: "Swine Flu, Pandemic Flu & Seasonal Flu," "Avian Flu" and "Hygiene Education." KathleenSeidel aka -- 21:28, 2 May 2009 (UTC) Proposed categories Categories of these subpages can be done in bulk with a template, which I might call . It will be able to manage any number of categories all in one hit: * - with the subpagename automatically in for ordering *English name of language *Native name of language The language names will just be dragged into place from the subpagename. We could also have a category for the whole subpagename in case that's useful. It would not need dragging but would use the magic word. Comments here in the next 7 hours if possible, please! — Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:15, 2 May 2009 (UTC) Sounds reasonable to me. KathleenSeidel aka -- 11:41, 2 May 2009 (UTC) Next desirable additions to article #'Native names of languages' - with " - " as joiners #'More language headings' even if there's only one link Those are so that someone can create the subpages early. Subheadings are better using three equals signs at each end rather than indent+italic. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:15, 2 May 2009 (UTC) I did a little more subpaging, but I don't want to do any that do not have their native names yet, and I've not done any that have three links or fewer. If we can get all of the native names, I'll do a complete subpaging. A few more of them would be good on the bigger lists so as to shorten the page markedly. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:30, 2 May 2009 (UTC) ::I got the native names from the List of ISO 639-2 codes. For a number of languages represented on Influenza educational materials, the native names are provided on the ISO list, but I don't have the proper encoding to display the characters; rather, they display as a series of question marks. (I am using a 6-year old eMac running Mac OS X 10.3.9.) Since the characters don't render properly on my screen, I didn't copy them into the language names. I can copy in the names that render properly on my husband's laptop when I have access to it on Monday. ::Here are the (mostly Asian) languages in that group. I'm copying in here what look to me like question marks; they may look very different on other systems: ::Amharic- አማርኛ ::Armenian- Հայերեն լեզու ::Bengali- বাংলা ::Burmese- ျမန္မာစာ ::Georgian- ქართული ენა ::Gujarati- ગુજરાતી ::Hindi- हिन्दी ::Khmer- ភាសាខ្មែរ ::Lao- ພາສາລາວ ::Tamil- தமிழ் ::Tigrinya- ትግርኛ ::KathleenSeidel aka -- 22:06, 2 May 2009 (UTC) :::Several of the ones we have are all question-marks to me (on a 9-year-old WindowsMe), but they and the above probably work OK because the machine will be "rendering", in the only way it can, a group of possibly four symbols that make up the code in UTF or something. Maybe some other contributor can have a look at the above and see if they look right. A matter for a help desk appeal? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:47, 3 May 2009 (UTC) :I would suggest renaming the subpages to just being in the Latin alphabet (whilst still showing the native-language names). Mediawiki handles unicode characters pretty well, but it does make pages harder to find, harder to link to, and there's a chance of browsers not handling it properly. We could easily still list the native name in the table, and even have a redirect from that name? Gboyers talk 16:15, 3 May 2009 (UTC) ::I've answered that below. Having more variety of categories gives users more choice. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 16:09, 9 May 2009 (UTC) I see Amharic is up there. Its section could use it so that I can subpage it. Not tonight. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 16:09, 9 May 2009 (UTC) Please don't change native names without consultation or at least leaving a clear note in the edit summary. I think that's how we lost Georgian for a week. Took me half an hour to find where it was after its language was changed. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 16:09, 9 May 2009 (UTC) :Whoops, sorry, thanks for pointing that out. KathleenSeidel aka -- 19:48, 9 May 2009 (UTC) DPL How about using DPL to display information about the subpages on this page? Oset• 11:06, 2 May 2009 (UTC) :Once we have put nearly all of the links onto subpages so that the page isn't too slow to load, that might be a good idea. But what info and how would you extract it? Try a mockup of the "English" one so that we can see what the possibilities are! (The only DPL I'm at all familiar with can be seen at Genealogy:Mary Brown). — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:30, 2 May 2009 (UTC) ::Nothing special really, but it could at least make the links to the subpages appear automatically. Dunno how to best implement it though. Oset• 15:03, 10 May 2009 (UTC) :::The links appear now, so I doubt if DPL will be worth investigating further. Thanks for the idea though. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:51, 11 May 2009 (UTC) TOC The double-column format with the text on the left and the TOC on the right looks much better than before. That said, do y'all think it would be appropriate to adjust the TOC for the main page (but not the subpages) so that it displays only the H2 headers and does not display the H3's? IMHO, in the context of the TOC for the main page, inclusion of the H3's creates unnecessary visual clutter. KathleenSeidel aka -- 12:22, 2 May 2009 (UTC) :It's not "double-column" - just floating the TOC to the right. I think it can be trimmed to just the H2 but I've forgotten if I ever knew how. And I doubt if it can be made double-column itself. Unless we get many more languages, the TOC will shorten noticeably as we do more subpaging. I think the length is of small significance, set against the value of seeing which subheadings there are. There would be a little less visual clutter if they were "sentence case", but I know some publishers like title case for headings and I guess you are accustomed to it. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:30, 2 May 2009 (UTC) Tabulation I've tabulated this page, which (I think) makes it easier to traverse. If you disagree, than we can easily revert it back to the section-heading format. The only disadvantage is that we lose the compact Table of Contents, so we could easily split it up into a couple of alphabetical sections (eg A-F, G-R, S-Z). Gboyers talk 16:15, 3 May 2009 (UTC) ::It is really looking good. I agree that that the tabular format makes the page easier to look at, and also agree that alphabetical sections would be useful. KathleenSeidel aka -- 22:51, 3 May 2009 (UTC) :::I've split it. If you would like more splits let me know. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 16:03, 9 May 2009 (UTC) My internet line had a bad day Was bad from morning till evening. So I've hardly looked at anything and now I'm off to bed. I see that there are some bigger blocks with native languages waiting to be subpaged. If I get properly organised I may be able to create and categorize each of the subpages, and create links to its sources, in one hit. I will be using my categorization copied from Template:Edcat (as mentioned above). I hope anybody else categorizing the subpages will use it too, or discuss possible improvements. On this wiki it is not sensible to have educational materials listed under "I". Table is good. Should be easy for someone (though not Kathleen and possibly not me) to break into alpha blocks as discussed. I can't see how the native names make searching more difficult. If you search the wiki for "Korean" you will find relevant pages just as easily if there is an extra group of symbols in the title, in my experience. People wanting to search in their own script would conversely have to look a little further if it was only in the text. Kathleen's puzzlement about expanding link names has me puzzled; I thought she did it but maybe it happens automatically? Another thing to look at after some sleep. See you all! — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:01, 4 May 2009 (UTC) Those pesky non-Latin URL's I agree with GBoyers' comment above re using only Latin characters for page URL's. I've been developing a country-by-country list of ministries of health, flu updates, pandemic preparedness plans, NGO's, etc., and have been adding links to relevant Influenza educational materials pages. Problem is, any URL including non-Latin characters has to be cut-and-pasted from the browser; for instance, I can't just type in "Influenza_educational_materials/Arabic," I have to cut-and-paste in "Influenza_educational_materials/Arabic_-_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%A9" -- a real pain in the neck. Sites in Arabic-speaking countries don't even use Arabic characters for URL's; they generally use English terms for their page URL's. Same with Chinese and many other languages; that and the now-universal use of the characters "H1N1" to describe the entity formerly named swine flu makes it relatively easy to identify relevant pages in unfamiliar languages. Using non-Latin characters in URL's will make it more difficult for people to link to this wiki. Hopefully, the more solid, useful information we can make available here, the more people will want to link to it; it would be shame to discourage people from doing so because of overly complex URL's. I know that implementing such a change will require renaming a bunch of pages, another pain in the neck, but a minor pain that I am willing to incur if I am able (not being an admin and all), and if someone tells me how. I could take care of the job from the local library, where I can maintain my sign-on. KathleenSeidel aka --KathleenSeidel 21:15, 10 May 2009 (UTC) Access and linking by you First part of your statement has you typing "Influenza_educational_materials/Arabic" - lengthy and error-prone process (and worse for longer names such as Chinese (Traditional) or whatever). If I were doing that, I think I would use the "materials" main article (sitting in another window) and click to get to the Arabic subpage, never mind what it's called, then copy and paste the subpage title and make it a link. But if typing is really quicker for you, we can have redirects. Your work deserves instant easing. See next section. :Actually, what I've been doing is pasting "Influenza_educational_materials/" then adding the rest of the URL manually into the text editor if I can; if I can't, I do the copy-and-paste. Manual insertion of a straightforward, all-Latin character name often takes fewer mouse clicks and keystrokes than switching back and forth between browser and text editor, as well as between browser tabs, or than doing the copy and paste commands. (Old habits die hard; I learned how to type on a manual typewriter, and still cherish the memory of the viscerally satisfying response of a well-tuned IBM Selectric to each keystroke.) Of course, languages with widespread usage like English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic, I can just copy and paste in batches. Access and linking by outsiders Copying an URL into a web page or email shouldn't be a complex process even if there are unfamiliar characters; you just copy and paste the lot in one go. However, I agree that it is more difficult as the URL gets longer (particularly with email splitting an URL). So we can have redirects. But there's much less urgency for this change. Redirects To reduce URL length and reduce typing, I suggest that we add names that cut back to the plain English name AND omit the word "Influenza", which is rather superfluous on this wiki. Try your Arabic one: go to it and click "Move". The edit box for new name will have the old name waiting to be edited, so you delete "Influenza" and delete everything after "Arabic". That will merge two of the categories, but I can fix that fairly routinely if I care enough. When I'm creating the remaining subpages, I will create the current style first, apply my categories and intro (probably needing to vary the wording), then save and move. Let me look at the Arabic one and think about all its linkages before we do lots more. There will be a need to show the native language name somewhere, not just in the category. Maybe cutting (instead of deleting) it from the "Move" box will be best so that it can then be pasted near the top of the resulting page. There ought to be a way to get back to the all-languages pages as one can do now; that would be fixed if we renamed that page, I think. Yes, that's less work all round. One of us can move that page and all its subpages now, if that's OK with you. I'll go off for a snack and see if you've responded by the time I get back. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:51, 11 May 2009 (UTC) :Easy peasy, but not a process that the server will allow me to zip right through. I moved two pages (Arabic and Albanian), then got throttled; the throttle was lifted after several minutes, I did two more then got throttled again. But it's not a major problem; I'll be here at the library for a few hours, so can just switch over to moving pages every now and then until I'm cut off again. OK, I've removed "Influenza" from the main page too (and its subpages) so that the "final" subpages link directly back to it. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:51, 12 May 2009 (UTC) Ninety-three; would Kathleen like to have more of them on subpages? More than half are on subpages. I wonder whether Kathleen would find it easier if all (except the new ones) were on subpages so that she could jump straight to each one with a search instead of coming to this page to check whether there is a subpage. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 07:31, 15 May 2009 (UTC) ::At this point, creating subpages for the rest seems like the logical thing to do. There are only about twenty-three languages left without them, and six of those already have two or more items. KathleenSeidel aka -- 12:42, 15 May 2009 (UTC) Would "edit" links to the subpages be useful? If a common way for editors to reach the subpages is via this page, we could add a link from here to the edit page as well as the subpage itself. Should be easy now that the subpage names have settled into a final-looking form. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 07:31, 15 May 2009 (UTC) :Yes, they would. KathleenSeidel aka -- 12:59, 15 May 2009 (UTC)